REKK.AQUA, the Water Economics Unit of the Regional Centre for Energy Policy Research is mainly concerned with economic and environmental analysis of water use and water damage prevention in Hungary and Central Europe. Our knowledge area can be divided into two major fields: water utilities and uses of the natural water cycles.

Our mission in the context of water issues focuses on the evaluation of a coherent economic perspective on activities that relies on the benefits of the natural water circulation (the small water cycle). Knowing its nature and explore its connections needs a comprehensive knowledge of natural, social and scientific fields. Water usesmodify this substantial environmental flow without having comprehensive knowledge about the effects neither on the water circulation itself nor on other human activities. Thissituation creates basis for inefficent resource allocation on many fields across the whole economy.

Our aim is to understand these interactions in their own context, their economic undertakings and ecosystem background, in order to find the suitable economic approach to set the conditions of both a sustainable resource allocation and an efficient infrastructure management – the intermediary instruments to reconcile conflicting interest over the use of water, land and other environmental resources and the infrastrucures we use to benefit by.

We founded the water economics unit in 2007, that based on our collegues previous work on the field. Below you find the most important of our previous work:

The management of the UNDP/GEF funded research project on municipal water and wastewater tariffs and effluent charges in seven countries of the Danube River Basin belongs to the professional experience of our colleagues at their previous job (MAKK, Hungarian Environmental Economics Centre). The research results and of the ASTEC model development can be found on the DRP project homepage.

We contributed with the economic analysis to the flood defense strategy analysis of the Tisza river „A Tisza árvízi szabályozása a Kárpát-medencében”. Hungarian language material gave an overview of the whole research program, and our economic analysis.

For the WWF Danube Carpathian Programme a comprehensive overview was prepared about the socio economic aspects of Danube waterway development plans in the context of the TEN-T policy. The full report, and the summary can be dowloaded from the project website.

Environmental-economics model calculations for the Bokartisz - Landscape Rehabilitation Program of the Bodrogköz Small Region program at MAKK. The concept that integrated the calculations, can be downloaded.